January 9, 2013

Did Nate Silver "enjoy getting the ire of pundits (not the few who actually critiqued your method, models, or assumptions, but those who just dismissed your work wholesale)"?

At some point in the last few weeks of the election, I guess I decided to lean into the upside outcome a little bit in terms of pushing back at the pundits in my public appearances — as opposed to emphasizing the uncertainty in the model, as I had for most of the year....

Stupid poker analogy: part of playing well is in maximizing the amount of value you get from a hand in the event that things go well, in addition to mitigating your losses if they don't.

Silver's model was right, but it was merely based on the polls. Other simpler models had the same prediction. If Silver wanted to, I suppose he could lie about what the model says and call an election for someone else, but it would be pretty clear to other analysts that his call diverged from the underlying polling data.

Anyone who was surprised that Silver got it right wasn't paying attention to the polls, or was kidding themselves about the potential degree of bias in the polls.

Of course, you've used an ellipsis to omit the part where he clarified: "(Nothing about the model design itself changed — just how I tended to talk about it.)"

So, for instance, he wouldn't change the fact that the model said Obama has an 80% chance of winning. He'd just realize there are different ways to talk about this, e.g. "Obama is very likely to win," or "It's quite possible that either candidate could win," and he'd make a self-interested decision about which of those true statements to make about the same probability. This is in contrast with most pundits, who can wildly vary their fundamental predictions for whatever reasons they want. Silver binds himself to a model that yields precise predictions, and yes, he has some choice about how to talk about them.